The Fat Angel Sings

On “Sirenas”, Los Angeles quartet Allah-Las explore psychic vistas of atmospheric instrumental storytelling. The band’s sixth album coalesces around a more spontaneous soundscape shaped by freeform experimentation, intuitive vibrations, and open-ended moments of inner and outer worlding. Channeling a fluid sweep of influences, from The Durutti Column, I.A.O., and Popol Vuh’s scores for Werner Herzog to Jacques Cousteau’s expansion of The Silent World beneath the ocean’s surface, “Sirenas” mediates on subconscious grooves loosely imagined and deeply felt, and opens up previously unimagined pathways in the process.

A sound cultivated from the annals of California culture; the perfect mixture of the sands, the seas, the streets and cities of the golden state.

All songs written by Matthew Correia, Spencer Dunham, Miles Michaud, and Pedrum Siadatian

released August 28th, 2026

There are moments in Jimi’s history that continue to take on new meaning with each generation, and Woodstock is certainly one of them.

57 years later, Jimi’s performance at Woodstock remains one of the most powerful and unforgettable moments in music history. His interpretation of “Star Spangled Banner” transcended a traditional performance of the national album and became a cultural moment that continues to inspire discussion, interpretation and emotion across generations. I’m especially excited that Jimi Hendrix: Live At Woodstock – A Second Look is now streaming, giving fans a different perspective on this historic performance and allowing a new generation to experience that moment.

This edition also gives us an opportunity to look both backward and forward. We revisit some incredible performances from Jimi’s career, celebrate new ways to experience his music, and continue opening the archives through the official Jimi Hendrix YouTube Channel.

From Woodstock to Seattle and everywhere in between, Jimi’s music continues to travel across generations, across cultures, and around the world.

Thank you for continuing that journey with us, for keeping the music alive, and most importantly, for keeping Jimi’s spirit and legacy shining brightly.

The acclaimed concert film Jimi Hendrix: Live At Woodstock – A Second Look is now available on-demand from the Jimi Hendrix YouTube Channel.

Watch it for the first time or re-experience the historic film now. This unique black-and-white film captured at the original Woodstock festival in August 1969 offers fans a remarkable new perspective on classic Hendrix songs such as “Purple Haze” and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” Jimi’s amazing interpretation of “Star Spangled Banner,” and the only available footage of Jimi performing “Hear My Train A Comin’” at one of Jimi’s most celebrated live performances.

Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock in August 1969 was a turning point in the history of the counter-culture movement. As a summing up of one of the most volatile eras in the nation’s history, his adaptation of our national anthem has entered our cultural lexicon as perhaps the most powerful musical touchstone of the era

In conjunction with the debut of the extended concert film Jimi Hendrix: Live At Woodstock – A Second Look, we’re pleased to announce that we will be debuting more content to the Jimi Hendrix YouTube Channel over the coming weeks and months.  In addition to streaming the entire Jimi Hendrix music catalog via YouTube Music, fans can enjoy a growing collection of new and archival releases from the main Jimi Hendrix Channel. Subscribe today, follow our community posts, and be among the first to get updates on future releases.

Sub Pop newbie Lex Walton just dropped her label debut, “Ultimate Love Forever”, taking aim at many systemic transgressions including the “widespread meaninglessness in indie rock” at a time of genocide and tyranny. In a recent interview with Larry Fitzmaurice, Walton asked, “Do you need to see more people get killed for you to feel something other than a wristwatch at the himbo dome, or whatever fucking bullshit? What are you doing?” 

She’s talking about MJ Lenderman here, whose “houseboat” vocal gets a nod in “Hipster Runoff.” But Walton’s sentiment gnaws at something that’s angered me for years: everyone wants to rip off Neil Young but only the guitars. I think these Crazy Horse wannabes would be far more compelling if their lyrics gleaned anything but bro-y word salad or celebrity name-drops. But hey, what do I know?

Walton sheds her peers’ verbose habits by tearing into “hypnagogic Republicans, shitgaze landlords” like Ariel Pink and Wavves directly and calling out algorithms, short-form video content, drones, and killer cops for being equal players in the inevitable, optimized end of the world.

That “Hipster Runoff” is this totally batshit, Suicide-meets-Wolf Parade-style blog-rock scorcher, plagued with decay and produced by Dan Boeckner himself, is just another part of her language. While Arcade Fire’s Sarah Neufeld drags her bow across the song, Walton shouts out Kony 2012 and pushes back against the millennial apathy her music is so cleverly cribbing: “I know it’s the obvious thing to say / It’s not gonna change anyone’s mind / But you know if they’re gonna round us all up tomorrow / I just want you to know that I hate you.” Rock music can’t save anyone anymore, but we can use it to say who’s killing us. 

Nestled across from the Mississippi River in present-day Southwestern Illinois, “Cahokia” was one of and most technologically complex urban civilizations in Medieval North America, theorized by archaeologists to have been constructed by multiple indigenous tribes. This pre-Colombian city—once a thriving hub for art, culture, and commerce—fell into ruin in the final centuries of the Middle Ages over a series of hypothesized environmental and colonial catastrophes. When Greg Freeman invokes the name of this centuries-gone civilization in his latest single, it follows snapshots of contemporary disillusionment with sub-par conditions that don’t change even when it feels as though we’re living through “the days of one thing after another.” The names and faces of those in power get swapped out but the struggles stay the same. The problems the new generation inherits are just leftover ones that those before them never figured out how to solve.

Freeman has been known to dig up the roots of whichever locale serves as the site of his songs and examine how the present has grown out of its regional history. His 2025 record, “Burnover” put a bar band spin on New England gothic, mythologizing the pine-shaded corners of Vermont and Upstate New York. Since “Burnover’s” release, Freeman has relocated to Chicago, so it makes sense that the story he tells on its follow-up, “All Set The Bone”, would begin in what would eventually become Illinois. “Time to join the world you fucked up / Time to wake your girls and boys up,” he intones as a buzzy electric guitar and some rumbling drum fills crash in—a call-to-arms that eschews subliminal messaging and instead opts for desperate directness. Armed with a new backing band and production from John Congleton, Freeman and co. have never sounded so urgent. “These are the days when subtly is dead and gone forever,” he declares. Maybe it should’ve died long ago. After all, the world has ended many times before.

On the 35th anniversary of Pearl Jam’s generation-shaking debut, here’s how the band’s members and collaborators remember its creation

Stone Gossard was 24 years old, and not ready to give up. In March 1990, Andrew Wood, the singer of Gossard’s band, Mother Love Bone, died of an overdose, just weeks before they were supposed to release their major-label debut. That summer, Gossard and his bandmates, including bassist Jeff Ament, were left mourning and adrift. Mother Love Bone had experienced the kind of instant success that made other local bands furious, signing a record deal after playing fewer than 10 shows.

What were the odds of winning that lottery twice? “I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Gossard said. “But I knew I wanted to make more demos and make more songs. I felt like I could do it again.”

He was, of course, correct. Within a few months of Wood’s death, Gossard composed an album’s worth of extraordinary songs, or at least the bones of them, minus vocal melodies and lyrics. “I’m pretty persistent,” said Gossard, who maintained a calm, prescient certainty that he would find another worthy band, another great singer. He was encouraged by the surge of Seattle rock around him, from Mudhoney, fronted by Gossard and Ament’s former Green River bandmate Mark Arm, to Soundgarden, whose next album would be “Badmotorfinger”. “I knew there was more out there,” said Gossard. “Andy was special, but I knew that there were other artists and other people out there that had a completely different thing.”

Gossard developed his new guitar riffs and arrangements in the attic of his parents’ house, alongside another guitarist he started hanging out with that year. Mike McCready was a metal kid turned Stevie Ray Vaughan acolyte with a gift for the kind of fluid solos that could make him “another singer in the band,” as Gossard saw it. At first, though, McCready wasn’t quite sure what they were supposed to be doing. “Stone asked me to play with him,” he recalled, “and after a week, we were in his parents’ attic, with his dog Hillie at his feet. And I said, ‘Dude, do you wanna play in a band together? What’s going on here?’ ‘Cause Stone keeps everything close to the chest, still does. And he said, ‘Yeah,’ so I was like, ‘OK,’ and I broke up the other band I was playing in, like, the next day.”

The music they were making was moody, turbulent and dramatic;  it’s not hard to hear Gossard’s grief and confusion in it. But much of it also had an obvious swagger and drive, sometimes with grooves that hinted at funk, or at least a Jane’s Addiction-like approximation of it. “I like propulsion, I like rhythm,” Gossard said. “I wanted people jumping up and down. It can be kind of like ‘Achilles Last Stand,’ or anything moving toward that heavy, funky, grooving, chaotic thing.”

Ament and Gossard had slipped apart for a few months. “He told me he was writing some songs,” said Ament, who considered going back to art school. “At that point, I just needed to not play music for a while. I felt like I had kind of used up my chances at that point.” But Ament fell back in love with music after filling in on bass for another friend’s band, and ended up back with Gossard for their still-unnamed new project. In a July 1990 Rolling Stone piece on the delayed release of Mother Love Bone’s LP, “Apple”, Gossard and Ament said they recorded 12 instrumental demos and were “scouting additional talent for an entirely new group.”

To record those demos, Gossard reached out to Seattle’s best drummer, Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron. “I’ve met him a couple of times,” Gossard recalled thinking. “I’m presumptuous, so I’m actually going to call him and see if he’ll do it.” Guided by huge cardboard chord charts pasted up on the walls of Reciprocal Studios in Seattle, they knocked out the songs over two weekends. “I got the impression that he definitely had a pretty big picture of what this next musical endeavor was going to be,” said Cameron. “I felt like the music was very well-arranged and very well-focused for a potential singer. It felt like everything was parted out for vocals.” In some cases, the path was laid out: The song that would become “Black” (temporarily titled “E Ballad”) already had its wordless hook in the demo. The early version of “Alive” is an anomaly, since Gossard originally wrote the music in the Mother Love Bone days, and Wood had written an entirely different song to it. Titled “Dollar Short,” its lyrics and melodies are apparently lost to history. Mother Love Bone rehearsed it and played it at least once live but never recorded it in a studio.

Former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons told Gossard and Ament about a guy living in San Diego named Eddie Vedder, who had recently made an impression on Irons and his friends, Flea among them, with his daring antics on a camping trip. “They were jumping off cliffs together on the river or something,” said Gossard. “He was well thought of.” Camping skills aside, Irons did also manage to mention at some point that Vedder “sings really good.”

Vedder got his hands on the tape, labelled “Stone Gossard Demos,” and the music on it stirred something in him. “I recorded my vocals in four or five hours,” Vedder said in 2009. He famously wrote most of the lyrics and melodies in his head while surfing after a couple sleepless nights. He was, at the time, working as a security supervisor at a petroleum company, while singing in bands and making four-track recordings in his home  —  the same spot where he recorded his vocals over the demo tape. “I just didn’t think about it,” he added. “And it changed our lives in infinite ways. It’s almost terrifying to listen to it. It gave me what’s certainly the best life I’ve ever lived  —  to be able to support my kids, to be able to travel. It was the best five hours I ever spent.”

The parts that Vedder laid down on “Alive” and “Once” (plus the eventual “Jeremy” B side, “Footsteps”) got eerily close to what would end up as the finished versions on “Ten“. There’s a rock-opera narrative there — the same character is in all three songs — that’s not necessarily obvious on the album. But the ingredients were all present, beginning with that singular singing voice, low, resonant and unabashedly passionate, the antidote to a decade of hard-rock singers trying to out-high-note each other. “I loved his low register immediately,” said Gossard. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is so great. Nobody’s going down there.’” Vedder’s elliptical tales of adolescent trauma were a perfect fit with music that blended classic-rock tropes (especially McCready’s solos) with punk energy, grunge guitar tones and the groove-heavy vibe of early-Nineties alt-rock. The music on that cassette helped define the sound, style and attitudes of a generation. It made Pearl Jam so ridiculously popular that they had to spend a decade retrenching.

All that said, Vedder didn’t completely nail it on his first try. “There was one part in there that’s as hysterical as anything I’ve ever heard  —  I haven’t laughed so hard in years,” Vedder said. He’s referring to his early version of “Once,” which is easily the goofiest thing he’s ever recorded. The humongous chorus is intact, but the rest wavers between bizarre spoken word segments and ill-advised falsetto funk breaks. “It becomes this little audio play or something. I’m fortunate that they were able to see beyond that and give me the job.”

Before Vedder actually got the gig, the other guys had to get to know him. In October 1990, the singer was able to get seven days off from his day job. He was ready to make the 1,200-mile drive from San Diego, only to be surprised and delighted to hear that Gossard and Co. would cover the cost of flying him out. “I was like, ‘Wow, OK… I don’t have to pay for it?’” Before he came out, Vedder completed two or three more songs over Gossard’s demos, including “Black.”

Vedder wanted to overcome any potential awkwardness by getting straight to work. “He called and said, ‘I just have one request, and that’s when we get there, if I can go straight from the airport to the practice place and we can play,’” recalled Ament. “And so, that was kinda our mode for the next week. We’d play for three or four hours, and we go over and get a bean burrito at Mama’s, and we’d play until seven or eight at night, and then we’d hang out and drink some wine or whatever and whatever we did, and we did that for five or six days straight, and half the time we were working on songs we already knew, and half the time we were, like, jamming.”

It was clear to everyone involved that the band was the real deal. “I had never really been in a situation like that, where all five guys were fuckin’ firing on all cylinders,” said McCready. “And it wasn’t too thought out. I mean, we’d rehearsed prior to it, but when it happened, it was like, ‘OK.’ I felt like we could fuckin’ take on some other bands. I was like, ‘We’re fuckin’ great!’”

On drums was another newcomer, Dave Krusen, who grew up half an hour away from Seattle, bashing out on prog-rock in his basement; the Police’s Stewart Copeland was a musical role model. Shortly before Vedder’s arrival, Krusen heard that the former members of Mother Love Bone needed a drummer. He called up Ament and had a successful jam session. “It was right in the mode of the stuff that I loved to play,” says Krusen, who developed the highly syncopated style he used on “Ten” simply by following Ament’s parts. The bassist eventually gave him a James Brown live album for Christmas and suggested he study it. Struggling with a drinking problem, Krusen would play on all of “Ten” and then immediately be pushed out of the band.  “He was pretty out of control,” said Gossard. But his former bandmates still love his playing, and reunited with him for their 2017 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Dave Krusen was a real hero,” said Vedder. “He was really, really a great drummer. He had a great flow and a great style.”

Pearl Jam’s original line-up, who were about to christen themselves Mookie Blaylock, jammed for five or six days and came away with most of “Ten” ready to go, as a 10-song rough demo they knocked out at the end of that week demonstrates. “It wasn’t an audition,” said Vedder. “It was just an art project.” By January 1991, he had relocated permanently to Seattle, and the band went into the studio to record pro-level demos of several songs. One of them, “Alive,” ended up as the version on their finished album, despite attempts to re-record it. “We tried to do it and it was just like, ‘This is cool, but this one just has an urgency to it,’” said Krusen. “The fact that it isn’t as clean-sounding  —  and it’s not as ‘good’ sounding  —  just worked for that track, in the context of the lyrics and all that. We had to capture a feeling, and that was more important than the sound quality of the recording.”

When Pearl Jam entered Seattle’s London Bridge Studios in March to begin recording in earnest for the album, the band was well-rehearsed, especially after playing a bunch of live dates opening for Alice in Chains. The producer was Rick Parashar, whom they’d met on the Temple of the Dog album. But some of the musicians describe Parashar as more of an engineer than a producer. “Stone and Jeff were really doing the producing,” says Krusen. “And that’s how they got the sounds they did. Rick was more of a sounding board, and a great engineer.” Krusen’s first child was born just as they started recording, and he “was drinking every day” during the sessions. Considering all that, he plays remarkably well. “I learned to play on various substances,” he shrugs, though he regrets some of his performances.

“It was more difficult than making Temple of the Dog,” said Gossard. “That’s what I remember thinking. We overthought it. You can get really bogged down as a young band in the process of recording.” Eventually, tensions grew between the band and Parashar (who died in 2014). “It felt dysfunctional,” Gossard added. “We didn’t know where we wanted to go and that’s where it broke down, so communication got bad, and it just went south.” Nailing “Even Flow” was the hardest part, with Vedder recalling them recording it 70 times or more. Krusen partially blames himself. “That song has a giant edit in the middle of it because I just had a hard time tracking it. I don’t know why.”

Vedder was apparently unaware of his bandmates’ worries and tensions during the sessions.  Unlike Gossard and Ament, he had never made a professional album before, except for his contribution to “Hunger Strike.” “I’m glad I didn’t hear that then,” Vedder said, “because they had made records, and I thought they knew what they were doing! And I thought that this was my first chance to make a real record, and to be honest, I was pretty damn focused on the job at hand. I was in a new town and I was in a new whatever, so that replaced my friends and family, that batch of songs and writing. It was a big deal to be able to make a real record.”

When it came time for vocal overdubs, Parashar needed a break and brought in engineer Don Gilmore, who would later become a producer for Linkin Park and others. Gilmore recalls Vedder actually living in the recording studio, sleeping on a couch. “He had pictures, and artwork  —  kind of like an insane person  —  put up all over the studio,” Gilmore says with a laugh. The studio’s security system required Vedder to be locked in at night, but he didn’t mind. “Eddie wanted to redo stuff and redo stuff and redo stuff,” adds Gilmore. “He really wanted to get things right. So I come in in the morning, I unlock the door, and Eddie would come out and he’d be drawing and doing things and having coffee, and he’s like, ‘Yep, let’s do it.’ So we’d get in there and would just work all day.”

Vedder was revising lyrics, and also trying to get the vocal takes up to his standards, which were already quite high. “He had complete command over what he was doing,” says Gilmore. “Eddie just was in search of perfection, not unlike a lot of big artists. . . . He was sort of internally producing himself and directing himself. He had an idea of what he wanted, and nobody was going to tell him it would be a different way.”

Engineer Tim Goldstone mixed the album in the English countryside, with the band hanging out in the pastoral setting of Ridge Farm Studio, where the Smiths had recorded Meat Is Murder. It was mostly relaxed. Between some minor overdubs, most of the band played tennis, and McCready recalls “smoking a bunch of hash” and listening to a couple of Pink Floyd albums that Ament suggested. But Vedder remembered at least one battle: He had to fight off an effort to cut 45 seconds out of “Black,” including the part where he sings, “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life.” “That’s almost the peak of the song there,” said Vedder, still a little peeved, “and it almost got lost.”

At some point in the process, the band is convinced something went wrong. The guitars and drums float inside stadium-size digital reverb that now sounds more Eighties than Nineties, which they tried to rectify with a tougher-sounding 2009 remix by Brendan O’Brien. In general, the members of Pearl Jam are more critical of “Ten” than most of their fans. “From a musical point of view, it still seems kind of unrealized,” said Gossard. “But that just shows I can’t hear it.” Still, he loves playing the songs live: “The way we inhabit the songs and what they mean to all of us now is incredible, in terms of what they mean to the crowd  —  and how long ago they were written and how they still reveal new things.”

In the end, “Ten” is the sound of a band settling in for what they already knew would be a long, long ride. “We would always think, ‘What’s the third record going to be, what’s the fourth record going to be like?’” said Vedder. “We were really wanting to figure it out, knowing it was somehow going to get better. And we weren’t going to stop trying.”

While mainly known for its influential punk scene, Washington DC also had a thriving indie rock scene in the late ’80s and early-’90s that was heavily influenced by the UK’s C-86 scene and labels like Creation, Cherry Red and 4AD. Velocity Girl, in fact, were named for Primal Scream’s song on C-86, and played a similar style of very fuzzy janglepop.

The group included former Black Tambourine member Archie Moore and, originally, Bridget Cross who, when she left to focus on Unrest, would be replaced by vocalist Sarah Shannon. The band’s gift for melody, and love of shambolic, noisy guitars, is evident on this EP that collects songs from three early 7″s. “My Forgotten Favorite,” which would turn up a few years later on the Clueless soundtrack, is the obvious standout (and arguably Velocity Girl best song), but the other five songs are equally stellar.

Extended listening: Velocity Girl were more fond of 7″s than EPs, but their 1993 debut “Copacetic” (released, like all their albums, on Sub Pop) has held up well, and gotten better with age.

This new compilation “1989-1992” covers the band’s pre-Sub Pop years and shows that their skill with a tune was there from the beginning, across several line-up changes and numerous early releases. The all-time classic “Forgotten Favorite” is included, as is their debut single “I Don’t Care If You Go,” featuring original vocalist Bridget Cross (later of Unrest). There are also crucial split single and compilation contributions, a few choice covers (Beat Happening, The Jam) and even a pair of unreleased tunes.

Newly remastered and featuring extensive liner notes by DC scene scholar John R. Davis and gorgeous art by Galine Tumaysan, “1989-1992” is the comprehensive view of their early years that Velocity Girl has long deserved and their fans have long wanted.

released August 28th, 2026

35 years after “Ten” started it all, the band’s live performance of the album is coming to vinyl for the very first time! “Ten Live” is the complete “Ten” performance recorded on April 29th, 2016, at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center.

The three-sided LP captures a historic night when Pearl Jam performed the album in its entirety — for only the second time in the band’s history and the first time ever in the U.S. On April 29th, 2016, Pearl Jam played their 10th sold-out show in South Philadelphia. To mark the occasion, the venue had a special surprise for the band: a banner reading “Pearl Jam 10 South Philadelphia Sellouts” made to hang in the rafters of the Wells Fargo Center.

Seeing the banner, Eddie knew there was another way to celebrate.
“I saw that number and I was like, I think we gotta do it,” Eddie told the Philadelphia crowd from the stage that night.
What followed was Pearl Jam performing “Ten” all the way through, track-by-track.

“Philly gives back, they just give back,” Eddie told the crowd that night. “We just tried to figure out something that we could get for you. Something that we could wrap and unwrap with you.”

Preorders begin today, with the album arriving November. 27th in two colour editions: (“Turned My World To”) Black vinyl and a limited-edition clear vinyl pressing

One of the most influential progressive rock bands of the late ‘60s / early ‘70s, Soft Machine’s initial line-up was Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals), Kevin Ayers (bass, guitar, vocals), Daevid Allen (guitar) and Mike Ratledge (organ). They emerged from the UK underground in 1967, featuring prominently at epoch-making London venues such as the UFO Club and Middle Earth to establish a powerful reputation over the next decade with a series of accomplished albums and some innovative concert performances (notably in the UK and France) and with a support slot on the Jimi Hendrix Experience US tours throughout 1968.

Centred around the band’s five CBS albums (“Third” to “Seven“), “Slightly All The Time” includes an entirely different and previously unreleased set of recordings of the “Fifth” album. It also contains all of the band’s extant BBC sessions (the complete performances for the first time) and a significant amount of previously unavailable audio-visual full concert recordings.

After two albums for ABC/Probe – “The Soft Machine” and “Volume Two” – they signed to CBS/Columbia with a line-up consisting of Wyatt, Ratledge, saxophonist Elton Dean and bassist Hugh Hopper, releasing their most successful long player, “Third”, came in 1970. This was followed by four more albums during a period of significant acclaim across Europe, and a frequently evolving line-up.

Soft Machine disbanded in 1978, apart from the occasional reunion, before being relaunched as Soft Machine Legacy in 2004, touring extensively and making many more albums. Since 2016 they have been known simply as Soft Machine and in March this year the current line-up issued their latest album, “Thirteen“. They will be playing live across the UK and Europe for the rest of the year and well into 2027, including festivals and club dates in Italy, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Hungary.

This extensive boxed set presents the story of the most vital, influential period in the Soft Machine story. Centred around their five CBS albums, all remastered from the original ¼” tapes and including the discovery of an entirely different and previously unreleased set of recordings of their “Fifth” album, it also contains all of their extant BBC sessions (some have been released before, decades ago, these are the complete performances for the first time) and a significant amount of previously unavailable audio-visual, full concert recordings from Europe (UK/France/Belgium/Germany).

Packaged in a sturdy 12” x 12” slipcase, with a hardback book featuring many rare photographs and extensive notes by journalist and author Sid Smith, progressive rock fans (who buy detailed boxed sets like this in large quantities), will delight in this comprehensive examination of one the great names in the genre.

Released on the 30th of October.

Roky Erickson’s The Evil One, the horror-rock masterpiece from our Austin hometown legend, restored to its original 1981 glory.

Roky Erickson’s definitive version of ‘The Evil One’ will be released by Fire, as a 15-track deluxe edition, restoring the original front cover from San Francisco’s 415 Records release for the first time since 1981.

The legend of 13th Floor Elevators leader Roky Erickson is one of the most compelling in rock and the brilliant “The Evil One” is perhaps his most influential album. Not widely heard at the time of release, this brilliant album grew to be an eccentric cult classic (aka the mother lode) in the following decades.

The recording sessions took place in 1978 and 1979 (with producer Stu Cook of Creedence Clearwater Revival fame) and 15 songs were completed. A UK version was released by CBS in 1980, followed by a US version in 1981 via 415 Records but each release had a different 10-song track listing. Luckily this new reissue of the album has all the 15 tracks including “Two-Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)”, “I Think of Demons”, “I Walked With a Zombie”, “Cold Night for Alligators” and “Night of the Vampire”.

Erickson’s place in the pantheon of outsider rock isn’t in question: he snarls about demons, zombies, vampires, ghosts, and more demons with all the passion and intensity of his music, good pitch and soul: he’s got it all but is his voice that shows the traits of the greatest rock singers.

Presented across two LPs cut at 45 rpm for maximum sonic depth and clarity, the release brings together the complete recordings from the legendary 1978 and 1979 sessions. The package includes a collector’s booklet with liner notes by acclaimed Austin music journalist Joe Nick Patoski, who attended a recording session for The Evil One in 1979. Alongside rare photographs and archival images from the collection of Roky’s then manager, Craig Luckin.

Austin music journalist Joe Nick Patoski, who attended one of the album’s 1979 sessions, contributes a new essay to the LP and CD packaging, exploring Erickson’s extraordinary career, enduring influence and place in Texas rock history.

More than a standalone reissue, this deluxe edition of “The Evil One” opens an exciting new series honouring Roky Erickson’s extraordinary body of work, with “Gremlins Have Pictures” and “Don’t Slander Me” to follow in 2027.

Deluxe gatefold. The complete ’78 and ’79 sessions across two 45 RPM LPs for maximum depth and clarity. Pressed on orange and blue “Atom Brain Splatter” vinyl with a 24-page booklet of rare photos and liner notes. Ultra Limited

Limited Edition ‘Evil’ Black & White Splatter 2XLP

‘The Evil One’ is out 30th October. Available in:

“I’ve always wanted to use that title,” Sam Beam says of “Hen’s Teeth“, his eighth full-length album and his sixth for Sub Pop Records. “I just love it. To me it suggests the impossible. Hen’s teeth do not exist. And that’s what this record felt like: a gift that shouldn’t be there but it is. An impossible thing but it’s real.”

“Hen’s Teeth” and his previous album, “Light Verse“, are siblings of a sort. They were recorded during the same sessions after a year-long dry spell, with the same band, at Waystation studio in Laurel Canyon. “When I’ve been on a writing kick, and the band can meet me where I’m at, they push me into something I hadn’t imagined. I’m at a point in my life where spontaneity is a lot more important to me. I don’t have as much to prove as I used to. I’m a lot freer and I love making music more than ever. There are no right or wrong answers. You just pray for your luck and try your best.”

In this case prayers were answered and luck struck hard. The musicians cohered so quickly and inspired each other so much that they were often getting songs recorded in just a few takes, sometimes at the rate of two or three per day. The two albums might therefore be thought of as fraternal twins: they share DNA and complement each other but have distinct identities and are defined as much by their differences as their similarities.

Light Verse (2024) took its name from a form of poetry that makes heavy use of wordplay, humour, and nonsense. Its cover depicts figures in silhouette, floating or falling through a cyanotype sky. It’s a sweet and airy album, impressionistic, at times even flirting with abstraction, a hearty shaking off of the doom and gloom of the Covid era. Many of the songs are named for ideas or feelings that gesture toward hope amidst uncertainty: “You Never Know,” “All in Good Time” (a gorgeous duet with Fiona Apple), “Cutting It Close,” “Taken by Surprise.”

The world of Hen’s Teeth is earthier, darker, more robust and more tactile than that of Light Verse. The songs have titles like “Roses,” “Robin’s Egg,” “Dates and Dead People,” “Singing Saw.” “Run into the one you love forever / Laugh into each other’s empty mouth,” Beam sings on “Roses,” the album’s first track. It’s one of several songs in which lovers are depicted as so deeply entwined they physically merge. “Paper and Stone” recalls that “But for the time we fell in two / You’d be me and I’d be you / One crust of bread could fit in our mouths / You’d breathe in and I’d let it out.” And on “In Your Ocean,” we find Beam “Praying for dry ground / Though I only want to drown / When I find myself swimming in your ocean.”

The cover is a portrait of Beam surrounded on all sides by flourishing ferns and other tropical plant life. He is wearing a pin-stripe jacket and holding a massive cluster of grapes, prodigious beard spilling down his chest. He could be a local harvest god or a gentleman outlaw holed up in a jungle cave. There are white feathers covering his eyes but these somehow do not suggest blindness. Rather they seem to literalize the poetic notion of an artist’s vision taking flight. The whole surreal scene is washed in humid, spooky red. It’s somewhere between Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, and the contrast with the cool blue-white palette of “Light Verse” could not be starker.

“The experiments in this one were more with genre than with form. For the last couple years one of my go-to’s has been Van Morrisson’s Astral Weeks, that style where jazz musicians play folk music and it blossoms in different ways than folk musicians are normally interested in doing. ‘Singing Saw’ feels like a song that Dock Boggs and Simon & Garfunkel might have done together. ‘Roses’ and ‘In Your Ocean’ are straight forward folk rock, but they build to these apocalyptic endings. ‘Dates and Dead People’ and ‘Defiance, Ohio’ take a lot from Tropicalia, which is some of my favorite music too. I don’t see it as that much different from jazz. All these forms have been in rock music forever.”

About the players: David Garza on guitar, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Tyler Chester on keyboards. Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, and Kyle Crane all play drums. Paul Cartwright plays violin and mandolin among other stringed instruments; he also handled string arrangements for both records. The indie-country trio I’m With Her appears on the ebullient lead single, “Robin’s Egg,” and again on the tender, mournful “Wait Up.”

“I’m obsessed with duets,” Beam says. “Ever since I did “Love Letter to Fire” with Jesca Hoop. I just love the form. It’s inherently dramatic. And it’s so fun. I had these songs and I finished them with I’m With Her in mind.” Arden Beam—Beam’s daughter—contributes harmonies and backing vocals onthe tracks, “Roses,” “Singing Saw,” “Defiance, Ohio” and “Grace Notes.” Her contributions lend a personal poignancy, as well as a wonderful sonic texture, to “Hen’s Teeth“. Born two months before the release of his debut album, “The Creek Drank the Cradle” (2002), she is now 23 years old and a musician herself—the first of his children to appear on one of his records.

“It’s exciting, making it more of a family affair. I like making Iron and Wine records, but I like the collaboration even more. Interacting with a bunch of friends and being blown away by what they can bring, musically and emotionally, to a set of three chords. I get to play all day with these people I love and they respond by giving me their most vulnerable, expressive self. It’s the weirdest, best job ever.”